


Church Going

by kindkit



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Politics, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:27:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blake and churches. Pre-"The Way Back."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Church Going

The Freedom Party often meets in the crypts of old churches. There's shelter from the weather and from all but the most focused surveillance scans.

Blake hates the crypts' damp and their death-cult trappings--the bodies and worms and bones carved into black rock, and sometimes real bones, too, in little niches. It's perverse, and he's not sure the Federation was wrong to make the new calendar, to wipe the world clean of this.

Above ground, though, he doubts his own doubts. Above ground, fragments of wall lift towards the empty sky where heaven used to be. Glass shards protrude from the fine stone tracery of broken windows. Blake thinks of light blazing through, blue and red and gold, and he can imagine how sacredness felt.

Before power tools, earth-movers, cranes and safety harnesses, people built this. Enslaved by superstition, taught to hate life and love death, they built this.

The Federation builds domes. It builds spaceships and weapons. It builds nothing that will ever catch the heart, nothing whose ruins would make a man want to cry.

He can tear it down with a clear conscience.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and most of the ideas derive from Philip Larkin's poems [Church Going](http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1685/) and [High Windows](http://plagiarist.com/poetry/390/).


End file.
